The bizarre disappearance of Iron Butterfly’s Philip Taylor Kramer
Science and music are naturally allied forces. Aside from the technical and personal alchemy behind potent sonics, the two fields have long been physically associated, whether in Timothy Leary befriending the Grateful Dead or Steely Dan guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter becoming a missile defence expert. Typically, this connection has been fruitful. Yet, the story of Iron Butterfly bassist turned scientific genius Philip Taylor Kramer is far less rosy. His bizarre 1995 disappearance and death still leave many questions, prompting much intrigue.
Kramer is not a household name. He might have been if he had played bass for the band during the late 1960s when they released the creepy proto-metal hit, ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’. However, he played on their critically panned final two albums in 1975, Scorching Beauty and Sun and Steel. After leaving Iron Butterfly in 1977, Kramer played in Magic and Gold alongside drummer Ron Bushy, his best friend. He was cut out for another path, though, as neither short-lived project made an impact.
In the 1980s, when technology started to boom, Kramer’s life took a more suitable course. His father, Ray Kramer, was an esteemed professor of electrical engineering, and his talent and interest in science and maths were passed down to him. In 1964, at the age of 12, he won a science fair at his Ohio school by building a laser with a strong enough beam to pop a balloon. Clearly, he didn’t possess any old intellect.
During the early decade, Kramer earned a degree in electrical engineering and, afterwards, found himself at the cutting edge of technology when he worked as a contractor for the US Department of Defence on the MX missile guidance system. He later gained experience in computer technology, working on fractal compression, facial recognition and advanced communications.
By 1990, things couldn’t be going much better for Kramer. That year, he founded Total Multimedia Inc alongside former child star Randy Jackson, which aimed to develop data compression for CD-ROMs. Business would continue to boom for a time, but in 1994, the company was forcibly reorganised under bankruptcy, and a new leadership structure was introduced.
Around this time, Kramer allegedly began working on a transmission project using gravity waves, taking his father’s original idea to discredit Albert Einstein’s famous theories and going one step further. By all accounts, at the time of his disappearance, he was putting the finishing touches on this new form of communication, which would have sent messages through space at a rate faster than the speed of light. He was about to unveil it, too. In a VH1 documentary about Kramer’s disappearance and death, Bushy says: “(It was) something that would totally revolutionise the way we communicate today and travel. To put that in a nutshell, we’re talking ‘Beam me up Scotty’, that’s it.”
Kramer was consumed by his work and sleep-deprived, noticeably sleeping terribly in the weeks before he disappeared. Nobody knows if this contributed to what happened.
On February 12th, 1995, Kramer drove to LAX airport to pick up a business associate, Greg Martini, and his wife. The plan was to pick the Martinis up and return to his home in Thousand Oaks – where his business was also based – to fetch his wife, Jennifer, with the four, then go north for dinner in Santa Barbara. However, he never picked up the Martinis. Before the couple had even left their plane, he had vanished. No one we know of saw him at the airport, but eerily, an IOU ticket he signed for parking showed that he was there.
Over the next 45 minutes, Kramer called his wife, father, and Bushy from his cell phone in his van. He told them all he loved them. His last call was to 911, a brief conversation in which he said he was going “to kill myself” before hanging up. That was the last communication he made, and he was never heard from again.
Four years later, on May 29th, Kramer’s Ford Aerostar minivan and skeletal remains were found by photographers at the boom of Decker Canyon near Malibu. It was a tragic and inexplicable discovery. Since then, several conspiracy theories have emerged, with one strange one concerning what he reportedly said to the police in his last call: “I’m going to kill myself. And I want everyone to know OJ Simpson is innocent. They did it.”
Before he disappeared, Kramer had analysed the authenticity of a videotape the FBI and DEA were using in the high-profile Simpson murder trial. It is alleged the FBI did not look into his findings despite being asked to do so twice.
However, it is Kramer Sr who has stoked the most intrigue, with him relaying a key message his son allegedly told him sometime before his death. “Taylor had told me a long time before, there was people giving him problems,” Ray Kramer told VH1. “They wanted what he was doing, and several of them had threatened him. He told me, ‘If I ever say I’m gonna kill myself, don’t you believe it. I’m gonna be needing help.'”
